Much like any virus, organizational cynicism can spread beyond the cynic alone. This research focused on the relationships between 204 employees and their supervisors and found that if either one expressed cynical workplace attitudes, this spread to the other. The spread of cynicism had a negative impact on a host of important organizational outcomes ranging from the quality of the relationship between the employee and supervisor, job satisfaction, commitment and ultimately, job performance. These results suggest that the documented increase in organizational cynicism might be the result of its viral-like effect on people in organizations.

The series takes a "big tent" approach to business ethics, featuring academic and non-academic speakers examining a wide range of issues related to ethics in the world of commerce and in institutional life more generally.